II.
I have tried, madam, to tell what was your past, and how the mercy of God prepared you in it by his far-reaching hand for the marvels of the present. What is now this marvel? It is the mystic marriage with Jesus Christ, by the communion with his real body and with his real blood, in the sacrament of his true church. Affianced of God in baptism, you become his spouse in the Eucharist. "Oh! blessed are you to have been called to the marriage feast of the Lamb." [Footnote 72]
[Footnote 72: Apocalypse xix. 9.]
It is not without a touching motive that you have chosen the 14th of July to consummate this solemn act. This is the anniversary of your marriage—of that marriage sundered by death. You have made your entry into the Catholic Church the epoch of a great transformation in your spiritual life: you have chosen the day most appropriately, desiring that this date, so full of the remembrances of tenderness and grief, should mark your entire union with your crucified Lord, to be no more separated for ever.
How beautiful is he—in his blood, and through your tears—this Spouse of Calvary, and how lovely, and how truly is he made for you, my daughter! It is not
"Patience on a monument smiling at grief:"
it is love transported with sorrow and reposing in death.
I remember well the day when I met you for the first time in the parlor of my humble convent. The Catholic crucifix you already wore upon your breast, and from time to time your eyes were turned toward that other cross suspended against the wall, and which presided over our interview, full of light and full of tears, with an expression which revealed your whole soul—all that it still lacked—all that it already foresaw.
I would exaggerate nothing, and above all I would offend no one; but can I not say that the orbit wherein, ordinarily, Protestant piety moves is the divine, rather than God himself? It is conscience, with its steel-like temper, which is at the same time evangelic and personal. It is respect for truth—the instinctive taste for what is moral and religious. All these are what I call the divine: it is not God. It is the glorious ray of the sun, but it is not that resplendent disk. Where, then, is the elevation of the soul to the living God? "My soul has thirsted for the strong and living God; when shall I come, and appear before his face?" [Footnote 73]